


these things go

by antipattern



Category: Breaking Bad, El Camino - Fandom
Genre: El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Implied/Referenced Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-18
Updated: 2019-10-18
Packaged: 2020-12-21 16:16:42
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,896
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21077759
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/antipattern/pseuds/antipattern
Summary: There was a time when they could all have died happy.





	these things go

When they pick him up from the airport, Jake’s eyes and face are red. Like he’s been holding his head with one hand the whole way home.

“Did you get some sleep on the plane?” Adam asks, reaching for his son’s suitcase. Jake is faster and steps past him, hoists the suitcase into the trunk and climbs in the back with his piccolo case.

“No,” he says, and buckles in.

“You should try to stay up until tonight, sweetheart,” Diane says. “Or at least until seven. To help with the jetlag.”

“Traffic’s not too bad,” Adam remarks as they get going.

“It’s three PM on a Friday, Dad.”

“Traffic’s not too bad for three PM on a Friday,” Adam agrees. Jake says nothing for minutes. Diane moves to turn on the radio before she reconsiders. Adam looks in the rearview mirror, sees Jake’s eyes half-lidded, says “Hey, stay awake. Did you go to Buckingham Palace?” Jake grunts. Adam continues. “You know, I spent a semester in London when I was in college. I studied business, and honestly, if the opportunity presented itself? I’d go back there in a heartbeat.”

“Him and his friends would try and make the Buckingham Palace guards laugh,” Diane says, smiling in a way that her muscles don’t agree with. “Your father figured they’d have better luck early in the morning or late at night. At least that’s what he told me.” What she doesn’t say but does know is that he and his friends would go out piss drunk and didn’t make it to the palace more than half the time. Most of what Adam remembers of England are his hangovers, but Jake doesn’t need to know that.

“Great,” Jake says. His piccolo case slides across the seat as Adam makes a sharp left turn, and he makes no move to grab it. “Fantastic. Mom, can you put something on? With words, please.”

Diane purses her lips, which feels more familiar. “I don’t—I don’t think that’s such a great idea right now, Jake.”

Jake snorts. “Are you serious?” “

"Jake—" Adam warns, hands tighter on the steering wheel.

“Did you actually think I wouldn’t hear about it? They were talking about him in England.” Jake isn’t sure which of his parents makes a sound like a deflating balloon, but he thinks it’s his mom.

“Who?” Diane manages. She doesn’t look back at her son.

“The band kids, mostly.” Jake yawns and watches his breath fog up the window. “The teachers, when they didn’t think I was listening. It was a lot of ‘I knew Walt when I was at J.P. Wynne. I thought he was a bit off, but you’d never guess, not in a million years.’ Good thing they didn’t take bets.” He scratches his throat. “Or it was ‘Do you think Jake knows? It’s a good thing kids don’t watch the news.’” He fishes a stick of gum from his pocket, unfolds the wrapper. “Old people think we’re so stupid. I mean, the bus driver put on some British radio station and they were talking about Heisenberg, how it got as far as the Czech Republic.” He pops the gum into his mouth. “Talking about the lab. Mrs. Henderson made him turn it off.”

Adam almost takes the side mirror off of a passing car.

“Shit,” Jake says. “Shit.”

“He called us,” Diane tells him. Adam looks at her sharply but she raises a hand, handles it. “When we were washing dishes. Jesse called us and told us to come get him, Jake. _He called us_.”

Jake laughs with the gum under his tongue, and damn if he doesn’t sound just like Jesse. “Why the fuck don’t we have a dishwasher?”

\--

There were no ducks in the pond they used to go to for picnics, and then there were no guns in the safe. He hadn’t gone through their drawers, trying to find change or Diane’s jewelry or Adam’s watches or something else he could pawn off. Still, the police needed to search the house. “Of course. Whatever you need,” Adam did not remember saying.

They dusted for fingerprints and gave their business cards. “We’ll keep watching the house, and we still have a few officers around the park. I’m sorry you waited there so long,” one of the cops said. Adam shook his head. They knew the cavalry was coming even if their son was not.

“Mr. and Mrs. Pinkman,” said another, extending his hand to Adam, who squeezed it limply.

“Adam and Diane, please. Like we said earlier.”

The cop sucked in a breath. “Of course, Adam and Diane. I know how hard this must be for you.”

“Do you?” asked Diane. She looked at a photo of herself and Ginny on her nightstand. They’d been in their late teens and Ginny had the most beautiful hair. When Jesse was little, about five or six, he had asked if Aunt Ginny was his real mother. He was disappointed to hear she was not. “She’s real pretty, Mommy,” he’d explained. “You draw better, though.”

“We really appreciate your cooperation,” a third officer told them. “What you saw on the news—"

“We were on the news,” Adam says. “Yes. We hold by that.”

Adam remembered a trip they’d taken to a dude ranch two and a half hours southwest of Albuquerque. Jake had been a baby, and Jesse—

Adam had taken him to a shooting range on the property and watched Jesse miss every paper target, one by one. When they returned to the cabin, where Diane and Jake had stayed back, Adam leaned into her and said, “Jake will get my dad’s guns some day.” She had laughed.

Diane realized Jake’s birthday was coming up soon.

\--

Generally speaking, Diane does not watch the news. “What can you change?” Diane had explained once. “It’s always so upsetting.”

Adam was never a newshound, but he did read the paper, both the real one and the school newspaper that Jake edited. He used to give him pitches at the dinner table, ideas for articles that might look good in a portfolio for college applications, but that stops the next week. Their subscription to the _Albuquerque Journal_ stops too.

Jake will have none of it. When Adam talks about the weather he talks about a break in the case. When Diane asks him about school he tells her only what they say about his brother.

Every night she looks at his computer before they go to sleep. This has been a nightly ritual for as long as Jake has had a personal computer, and this has been necessary since Jesse moved in with Ginny. But she’s never found anything objectionable on Jake’s computer before.

Jake hurts them in the way that only teenage boys can do. He scours the internet for images from the compound. He leaves them up for his mother to find, pretending to be asleep as she stares in breathless horror. There are images she’s seen before, before she had the sense to go on a full media blackout—an underground cage, broken shackles, some sort of dog run—and more. There’s footage from a CCTV camera. She makes it back to the master bedroom before she starts crying.

They don’t speak of it the next morning. Jake talks at dinner.

\--

Adam goes to work and they think he’s crazy. No one says it to his face, of course, and he doesn’t like falling behind.

He’s almost able to get lost in spreadsheets when he leaves his office for a bathroom break. On his way over he sees Noah Palmer and Tanya from HR huddled around a desktop in Noah’s cubicle. They’re sharing a pair of earbuds. It’s completely unsanitary and unprofessional, and Adam thinks he sees the Fox affiliate logo reflected in Noah’s glasses, but that’s not what stops him in his tracks.

“Damn,” Noah says. “That’s why you tell your kids you love them.”

At the 1:30 meeting he chews Noah out in front of fifty people for a mistake he made a month ago. Adam takes time off of work after that.

\--

“Do you know what Miguel told me?” Jake asks one night. “You know Miguel, he plays trombone and his uncle is a detective for APD. He speaks at a lot of fundraisers. Anyways.” He pushes the polenta around his plate with the fork. “He says that the guys who were keeping Jesse, that they fucked him.”

Diane drops the bowl of peas she is carrying to the table. They roll around the kitchen floor. “Why would Miguel tell you that?” one of them, or both of them, demands of Jake. He shrugs.

“He thought I should know. And I agree with him.” Jake will become fastidious, obsessed, devour every detail and spit it in their face. “I deserve to know everything that happened.”

“Why, Jake?” Diane says, because she and Adam do not think about concrete in an underground cage stained with Jesse’s blood, or a bucket with traces of his shit, or CCTV footage of a man rolling up his shirt as three other men laugh as they all put out their cigarettes between his shoulder blades and his back. They do not think about how the burns orbit that awful sugar skull tattoo, the clearest thing on camera. They do not.

“Because pretending a thing didn’t happen doesn’t make it not happen,” Jake says. “Jesus. I am so sick of you.”

He gets up to leave and Adam raises a hand, warns “Jake…”, and Jake reconsiders. He sits back down.

“You remember the joint, right? When you kicked him out, two years ago?”

“He told us something on the call, and he was right,” Adam says. “He said it wasn’t on us. That it wasn’t what we did.”

Jake laughs in disbelief. “It’s on me, then. That fucking joint was mine and Jesse covered for me. You know what, I’m going to bed.”

Adam and Diane hold each other and they do not think about a bullet hole in Jesse’s head, his scarred body lying in an alleyway or a ditch. They do not think about this forever. Ask them any time.

\--

“Did you see a lot of birds in London?” Adam says, much later. “I remember that. A lot of blackbirds.”

“A lot of blackbirds, yeah,” Jake will offer, perhaps taking pity on them.

“Did you feed them?” Adam asks.

“No, you’re not supposed to do that anymore,” Jake says knowingly. “It’s not good for them.”

Diane thinks of the pond where they had waited for Jesse. When they used to go for picnics they’d bring egg-salad sandwiches for Diane, peanut butter for Adam and Jake, and Jesse would insist on making his own Wonder Bread-and-marshmallow fluff monstrosity. “Not even peanut butter and fluff?” Adam would ask. “Some actual nutrition,” but Jesse couldn’t be dissuaded.

He’d rip off the crusts where the fluff didn’t touch. He’d take his younger brother by the hand, bring him to the edge of the water despite Adam’s protests, and hand Jake bits of the bread. He would tell him to throw them to the smaller ducks. “Got to give it to the underdogs, yo,” he’d explain, his head thrown back to face the sun, and Jake would mimic him, giggling. Diane supposes there was a time when they could all have died happy.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not thrilled with how these vignettes came out, but sometimes you can't stop thinking about something and you just have to exorcise it from your system. 
> 
> I haven't written fanfiction since I was making fun of Twilight almost half a life ago, and I wasn't thinking about doing it seriously until El Camino came out. I'd love to hear what you think.


End file.
